Maximum-Utility Scheduling for Multimedia Transmission in Drive-Thru Internet

How to support multimedia services for people on the road is a pressing issue. Relying on the vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, the limited wireless resources and vehicle sojourn time make it quite challenging to schedule the transmissions of multiple vehicles to ensure high efficiency and quality. In this paper, the scheduling of multimedia transmissions over drive-thru Internet is investigated. A utility model is devised to map the throughput to user's satisfaction level. The objective of the scheduling problem is to maximize the total utility. Then, the optimization problem is formulated as a finite-state decision problem with the assumption that future arrival information is known, and it is solved by a searching algorithm as the benchmark. To obtain a real-time solution, a practical heuristic algorithm based on the concept of utility potential is devised. We further implemented the solution and conducted extensive simulations using NS-3, and the simulation results show that the proposed heuristic algorithm can outperform the state-of-the-art one; therefore, it can effectively make scheduling decisions to achieve both higher utility and efficiency and better fairness.